It was Gabe Gudding who made me stop to think twice about Poet's Bookshelf, Peter Davis’ collection of poets’ lists of the books that have been, in the words of the editor’s invitation to its contributors “most ‘essential’ to you, as a poet.” Davis asked each contributor to list 5-10 such books, and to “write some comments about the list.” These questions went out to a wide range of poets, some 81 of whom replied, almost all American & mostly mid-career or older:

Ai, Nin Andrews, Antler, Rae Armantrout, Angela Ball, Marvin Bell, Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Eavan Boland, Catherine Bowman, Alan Catlin, Henri Cole, Wanda Coleman, Clark Coolidge, Jim Daniels, Denise Duhamel, Stephen Dunn, Russell Edson, Elaine Equi, Clayton Eshleman, B. H. Fairchild, Annie Finch, Alice Friman, Amy Gerstler, Albert Goldbarth, Gabriel Gudding, Thom Gunn, Sam Hamill, Joy Harjo, Michael S. Harper, Lola Haskins, Bob Hicok, Tony Hoagland, Paul Hoover, Fanny Howe, Andrew Hudgins, Lisa Jarnot, Peter Johnson, X. J. Kennedy, David Kirby, Maxine Kumin, David Lehman, Philip Levine, Lyn Lifshin, Timothy Liu, Gerald Locklin, Thomas Lux, J. D. McClatchy, Peter Meinke, E. Ethelbert Miller, Thylias Moss, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ed Ochester, Molly Peacock, Lucia Perillo, Carl Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Charles Potts, Donald Revell, Adrienne Rich, Harvey Shapiro, Ron Silliman, W. D. Snodgrass, Juliana Spahr, Elizabeth Spires, Gerald Stern, David St. John, Virgil Suarez, David Trinidad, Paul Violi, Karen Volkman, David Wagoner, Charles Harper Webb, Dara Weir, Richard Wilbur, C. K. Williams, C. D. Wright, Charles Wright, Franz Wright, Dean Young, and Paul Zimmer.

That is an intriguing, if not entirely representative, list. For one thing – and I think this is a function of the age of the contributors as much as anything else – the ratio of male to female respondents is two to one, literally 54 to 27. More glaringly, tho, just seven contributors were born in 1960 or later, less than ten percent of the book. Just one poet – Anselm Berrigan – was born in the 1970s. Another way to put this is that, if you are in this anthology, you are as likely to have won a Pulitzer (also seven contributors) as you are be under the age of 45.

In terms of aesthetic tendencies, Davis has bent over to represent the entire range of contemporary poetry, so you will find post-Beat writers like Antler & Charlie Potts alongside of the quietest of the school thereof, along with langpos & other post-avants. If I note that I don’t find a single contributor to the New American Poetry here, I suspect that it was not because Davis failed to try. For one thing, there just aren’t that many of its contributors left, tho I’m saddened particularly not to see Creeley or Ashbery. The age range & this lack of the New American generation of post-avants means in practice that Poet’s Bookshelf is probably a more conservative cross-section of what is actually influencing poets today than really is the case.

Thus I was surprised to find my name among the 13 living poets listed among the roster of “most frequently listed authors.”¹ Gabe lists the thirteen as Ashbery, Edward Field, Charles Simic, James Tate, Louise Glück, W.S. Merwin, Carolyn Forché, Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, Galway Kinnell, Michael Ondaatje, and yours truly. That’s an interesting mix, divided as it is almost down the middle, with six post-avants & seven more conventional poets. Had the book been issued a month earlier, when Robert Creeley was still alive, it would have been precisely an even break. One can only wonder what kind of breakdown might have occurred had Davis had broadened the age range of his respondents.

Gabe has some insightful things to say about some of the proclivities of the School o’ Q folks who participated. The tendency to

(1) cast the canonic as the public and (2) cast the things poets really like to read and that were influential as (a) private, (b) individual

is completely consistent with a larger program to their choices seem not like choices at all, but inevitable (to the degree that they reinforce the canon) & individual only insofar as they serve to differentiate the poet him- or herself. Duplicitous? You bet. Standard operating procedure? Ditto. I’ll wager that the culprits (Gudding names names) don’t even recognize that this is what they’re doing.

Not every quiet poet responded that way, however. The late Thom Gunn, a superb poet whom one probably shouldn’t include in the School of Q roster, since, like Auden, he comes by his Anglo-centrism honestly, lists only two twentieth century poets: William Carlos Williams & Basil Bunting. Of Bunting’s Briggflats, he writes “For me it is the greatest poem of the last century.” Marvin Bell lists Pound, Creeley, Ginsberg & two books by Williams to his list – and I was especially happy to see John Logan on his list of quieter poets as well. Several of the SoQ folks mention Williams and/or Frank O’Hara.

This actually points to a curious phenomenon that pops up in the book – one that I suspect is “real,” i.e. true of a broader spectrum of poet/readers than one can find in this book. SoQ poets are often apt to include one – sometimes more – post-avant types in their reading lists of “essential books.” But post-avant poets virtually never list SoQ poets in theirs.

That can be interpreted variously, all the way from “SoQ poets are forced to concede that post-avant writing includes some of the most compelling poetry composed in the past century” to “post-avant poets are far more cliquish & closed-off to a wide range of writing than are SoQ folks.” But what if the real answer is more both/and rather than either/or?

You can find my own responses to this survey sprinkled through this blog’s archives in late August and early September, 2003.

 

 

¹ Seeing that made my day. I’m the optimistic sort who is easily encouraged. If a raving drunk accosted me on the street &, in the midst of a long string of mumbled obscenities, said “nice poems,” I’d be humming a tune all afternoon. Happily, the people who listed my name (and who mentioned three different books in doing so) are all poets whose opinions have long mattered to me.